Less common now than it once was. Social norms around random acts of childhood violence have shifted pretty dramatically. Back in the day, nerds were shoved against lockers, given wedgies, or just randomly beaten on in my high school (c. early to late 1990s). From what I've heard from my parents or folks their age, this was even more common in decades past.

I don't know if we're more enlightened now, or if we're simply more protective of, and involved in, every aspect of our children's lives. Either way, I doubt physical violence against nerds is as common as it may have been. Psychological violence, however, hasn't gone away. Bullying is alive and thriving in the US.

I graduated from a large public high school in middle America about 5 years ago. There were quite a few fights/acts of physical violence, virtually zero of which was directed at "nerds". If TV show style bullying ever existed it's mostly gone at this point. (Of course this is my experience - others may vary)

I think the sheer size of some high schools is what prevents bullying of specific groups; it becomes incredibly difficult to establish known social hierarchies when you have 1000 students per grade (not uncommon in large Midwestern high schools).

This means that there isn't much social ROI for bullying someone and so people are largely left to their own devices.

My school had closer to 400 students per grade than 1000, but it still had pretty defined cliques that people categorized into nerd/jock/popular kids/whatever. Additionally, bullying was still common, it was just mostly non-physical.

Regardless, even in this thread there are people who claim to be from small schools and have not experienced physical violence. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I do think it's far, far less common than Hollywood would have you believe.

The picture painted by the classic sitcom universe and essays like Paul Graham's "Revenge of the Nerds"—the one described so casually that it's almost as if agreement about it is expected to be a foregone conclusion—is something I found totally unrelatable growing up. It was something I always just chalked up to bad tropes that were holdovers from from sitcoms from an era past.

I was brainy in school, but none of the axes that groups split on resembled the ones you see in the movies, so most of my friends weren't. No jocks vs nerds. Nobody was intimidated or otherwise pressured as a result of doing well in class. More often than not, people were likely to be down on themselves for feeling dumb or when they felt they weren't keeping up. The best predictor of clustering habits was usually outgoing vs timid, and then those in the middle. But mobility within those clusters meant that even those were pretty fluid.

The type of humor my class most valued was, if not intelligent, then at least quick. Contrary to what the article lays out, in my view, Matthew Perry's Chandler Bing is probably one of the biggest influences there.

Aside from standard relationship drama, most everybody in my class got along. I wore glasses for a year starting in 4th grade after I began getting headaches at the end of the day. Once shortly after getting my prescription, a classmate called me "four-eyes" after lunch, and I just laughed in his face. He'd really meant for that one to sting, and he was a lot tougher than me, but that just wasn't a thing.

Anti-intellectualism was something that I noticed became a big thing after 9/11, to the point that I found it genuinely alarming, but it showed up clearer in the world I was seeing than the one I was living. Thankfully, the insanity died down (at least from where I'm standing), but we have Idiocracy and American Dad as artifacts. I've tried referencing that era since then, but I have difficulty, especially in regards to using words to recreate the world at that time in order to have a conversation about exactly why something like Idiocracy was originally made. My family and acquaintances who lived through it seem to just see the last 20 years as one homogeneous blur. "Shit was crazy" is what I've resigned myself using and is how I described it a few weeks ago to a friend of mine from Iraq.

After I'd graduated and moved out of state for school, I read a longform article about the death of irony that I thought was on-point in describing the world I grew up in vs the world I saw on TV growing up, but it's none of the ones that show up when I search for it now. The best and most direct treatment of the topic that I've seen since then is in the scene in 21 Jump Street when Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum first run into Dave Franco and his friends on the first day of their assignment (even though they fudged the timeline a bit).

My high school graduating class was something like 40 people, and I graduated in 2007. This all happened in a public school in a small town in North Texas (Collinsville).

I was fairly sure that my hometown wasn't special and this was just the way the world worked now, compared to the sitcom holdovers. Went to the University of Oklahoma (it's ranked first in National Merit Scholar enrollments for a public university, and they give out lots of money). Freshman year I was mostly weirded the fuck out, especially by the other people on my floor in my dorm and in the CS program. ("This isn't how people act in real life anymore, right? Nobody really buys into these tropes, do they?") Ended up having a pretty bad time there for as long as I stayed, and I left less sure about how the much the world differed from TV after all. I'm in neither Oklahoma nor North Texas anymore. What I've seen since suggests that Norman, Oklahoma is an anomaly; every now and then I'll meet someone with the same alma mater and the weirdness comes back. As far as predictors go, that has turned out to be a pretty good one for whether I'll be able to get along with someone or be totally at a loss for how to interact and connect with them. (Some false positives about whether someone will pass, but zero false negatives so far, unfortunately.)

In the USA, if you were a nerd that was not the victim of bullies and physical violence growing up in grade school, you would be in the slim, slim minority. I'd actually be quite surprised if anyone escaped some kind of violent altercation growing up as a nerd. Sad, but true.

I would definitely consider myself a nerd and I never got in a fight or physically hurt. I can't think of any friends that did either.

The vast, vast majority of violence that happened at my school (and we had a fair amount) was between unpopular, non-nerdy kids with homelife problems.

Same here on all counts. Without actual numbers, I have a hard time believing the previous assertion as anything more than anecdotal (as is my statement).

Wow, you guys are lucky (or maybe I'm just unlucky?). I guess it's hard to avoid generalizing from our own experiences though, glad to hear some of us made it through unscathed ;-)

Maybe in the 80s, but as a 22 year old physical violence has never happened to me or any of my nerdy friends. Verbal abuse? Sure, but everyone gets that.

Physical violence was mostly between the bullies/"bad kids".

Agreed the violence of the 80s was insane, especially in NYC. I was 10 the first time I was threatened with a gun, 12 the first time someone broke my bone in a beating (still visible 30 years later), 15 the second time I was beaten with a base-ball bat (20 years of chronic pain), 16 when I beaten by a group/gang. This doesn't even account the violence I saw perpetrated on others and things I forgotten. Violence was conspicuous and passerby's wouldn't even think of getting involved.

While I was nerdy, these things happened more because of differences of ethnicity than anything else.

When I left NYC I met someone who claimed that he had "never been punched" and I thought that was the craziest statement I had ever heard.

I am near two high schools in downtown Oakland and I have seen only 1 fight in the past 2 years. I think that today's kids are much less prone to violence even in the rougher neighborhoods and adults are much more likely to intervene.

Yeah, I can believe things are different since the 80's. Nerds seem to be much higher on the social totem pole now IMO. Also can I now say that I feel the the old guy going 'WELLLLL, back in MY day..." :-/

I can only speak for my own experience, but I was one of the "nerdiest" students in a school of ~2500 and never once felt physically threatened or faced physical bullying of any sort. And having gone to a top tier exclusively engineering school with a student body of people like me afterwards, I never once heard of someone having to deal with it either. I got picked on and bullied plenty, but never anything even resembling a physical threat.

We should probably define our terms. I never felt physically threatened (in the sense that I feared getting actually beat up and bloodied or seriously injured), but I was tossed around and shoved into things (physical acts of violence, even if relatively minor). Was your bullying non-physical or just, similar to mine, never escalating to the level of injury past bruised body and ego?

People draw the line at different points. Some might consider the shoving that happened frequently to me one year something far worse than what I considered it to be (frustrating and annoying, but not causing me any anxiety for fear that it'd happen again, I knew it'd happen again, but I didn't have panic attacks about it).

At no point was I concerned that someone would lay hands on me to any degree. It just wasn't something that students did to each other, unless they were the "fuck ups" and were fighting with each other.

So it's a lot more common in the US than in Europe then? Because over here, you weren't usually bullied for being a nerd. Indeed, some of the smartest people in the class/year were also often some of the most popular, at least in the UK.

>> Indeed, some of the smartest people in the class/year were also often some of the most popular, at least in the UK.

Same in India as well.

How physical violence is possible in US schools? - As I know US has very strict laws against physical violence - Students in US schools can be suspended not only for actual violence, but also for thread of violence and even for gesture: http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Montgomery-Co-Studen...

Yep, physical violence is so frowned upon, that both people are typically suspended/disciplined, and at least at my high school were typically sent to "in school suspension" which was basically a tiny room separate from the school where you had to sit. You can imagine how well it tended to work when you took two people that got into a fight had to sit in a tiny room with each other.

Also, no, it didn't matter who started the fight. If you were involved then you were equal and disciplined the same. It's ridiculously backwards

Bullying is most effectively done by socially talented sociopaths in many situations. Those at the top of the social hierarchy cajole those they need to, but demonstrate dominance and power over the weak. This should not be surprising.

The teachers naturally will "like" the talented social sociopath, so they forgive and don't punish their transgressions against the weak.

Well, there's the law, and then there's what actually happens. At the very least, you need evidence in the hands of authorities and willingness (of a number of people) to "prosecute", so to speak, before action is taken. I'm guessing both of those are rare.

Likewise (rural midwest US), it has always seemed to be one of those TV fictions.

Wow, I moved around the US every 3 or 4 years growing up and saw this as a very predictable, common pattern. Although I guess I was mainly in larger cities/schools...

Were you the nerd being beat up/bullied or did you just witness it at different schools? I also moved around a bit and got bullied. It was a lot more about being the new kid than being a nerd. Being a nerd was just what they used to taunt me.

I was that nerd, although admittedly I was only in one real fight (in grade school) and I didn't have too many problems beyond that.

[edit] I guess I didn't see too much actual violent fighting otherwise beyond (I guess) normal making fun of / pushing around of nerds, although I did see a few fights between girls and some involving more metalhead/burnout types (in case anyone is familiar with the John Hughes High Schooler taxonomy)

It probably does have something to do with school size, perhaps my class wasn't big enough to support the distinct cliques required (graduating class ~20).

It's probably that, I grew up in the Midwest in a rural school district (outside the school district of a ~100k population city) - we had a 400 or so graduating class though. This was early to mid 90s, and it was pretty standard through the 80s too, at least for me. In the mid 90s I fell into a grunge group and they were a bad influence. Instead of getting bullied about being a nerd, it switched to that, and taunts about blowing my brains out with a shotgun (around the time that happened) were pretty common.

Edit: to add this perspective though, my wife went to school in a relatively small town (Rolla, MO) and also had a 400 or so graduating class, but she claims ignorance of any sort of nerd bullying and thought it was a TV trope only thing too. She graduated in 2002. Maybe something changed between those dates?

I went to two Midwest high schools in the late 70's early 80's, one was large (5,000 students) and the other was tiny (17 in my class). Both schools had bullies, but the smaller private school had bullies with behavior far in excess of the large public school. The larger school had bullies that would fight each other and protect some nerds they liked or knew, while the smaller school was not diverse enough, so the few bullies had nothing to stop them, and they went way, way too far.

I also didn't see nerd-bullying, coming from a 500-student-per-grade public school in West LA.

Admittedly, it was unrepresentative in other ways: one third Ashkenazi Jewish, one third Persian Jewish, one third mostly-white-and-Asian other, very high population of affluent immigrants. We were plugged in to American pop culture, but I think we were isolated in some senses. Little to no idolization of the sports teams, for example.